After installing Openstack, I got KVM/QEMU installed as a by-product. To get myself familiar with the functionalities, I played with Virtulization Manager and the virsh command line. By comparing with the libvirt API, I found they are pretty similar. Therefore, I think it’s a good starting point before jumping to the APIs. Also, the virsh is implemented on top of the libvirt APIs. Read more...

While using PackStack to install OpenStack for multi-node topology, I found my SSH client was so slow that it failed the PackStack installation command. The ssh I had was the default one with CentOS 6.4: “OpenSSH_5.3p1, OpenSSL 1.0.0-fips 29 Mar 2010.” It seemed to work just fine while using PackStack for all-in-one deployment as described in my previous article.

To isolate the problem, I started to print more debug information from the SSH as follows: Read more...

Having successfully installed OpenStack all-in-one with PackStack, I started to try out the multi-node deployment. It ended up much longer time than I thought because of various issues mainly with networking. The following summarizes what I did to make it work, and some tricks and tips I found out during the process. Read more...

While writing technical blogs, it’s always nice to include commands and scripts that readers can try on their own. I find it a bit challenging to accurately document these in steps while intensively testing or debugging something by myself.

There are actually commands that faithfully list all the commands you typed. You can then clean them up for your posts. In the following, I introduce how to do these on Linux, Windows.

WebSocket is a new technology that is part of HTML5. It allows a browser (or an application that uses HTTP/HTTPS) to upgrade a HTTP/HTTPS connection to a full socket to the server so that both parties can send data at any time.

WebSocket Standard

The WebSocket protocol is defined in RFC 6455. The initial handshaking is a HTTP request with upgrade header like the following from the RFC:

With increasing popularity of OpenStack, I finally got chance to try it out by myself. As the first step, I chose to install everything into one machine (update: for multi-node deployment, check here). Thanks to the packstack project and RedHat documentation (http://openstack.redhat.com/Quickstart), it’s supposed to be straight forward and painless on CentOS. It turned out to be true if and only if you install it with direct HTTP(s) access to the Internet. Read more...

In my last article on orchestration, I talked about the issues with the current workflow design. Although intuitive and easy to get started, it’s really inefficient and hard to handle for complicated workflows. A natural follow up question is, “is there any better way to design workflows?”

Like everything else, there is hardly an approach that is better than others in every aspect. The alternative approach, coding, may not be as intuitive as the visualized flow chart approach, but it’s highly productive. So the quick answer for the above question is yes if you can combine them together. Read more...

I recently spent some time on vCenter Orchestrator and really liked it with nice integration with vSphere Web Client, even though the Web Client has to improve quite some before it can overtake the standalone vSphere Client.Coming from the programming background, I find the workflow design is pretty easy to understand. Although targeted mostly for people with no programming background, workflow has in fact stronger typing than typical scripting. That may explain why having programming background helps a lot to quickly ramp up on workflow development. Read more...

During the Microsoft Management Summit last month, I had an interesting chat with Rakesh Malhotra who is the VP product of Apprenda. It made me to think more about two important technologies: virtualization and PaaS. As we know, virtualization is almost a must for IaaS. Will it be the same case for PaaS?

The software-defined networking is the new buzzword for network centralization, which is also known as OpenFlow or network virtualization. The idea is to centralize the control to a server (or a cluster of servers) called controller.

With the acquisition of Nicira by VMware, the software-defined networking has caught many eyeballs from the community. From there, VMware extended it to a new vision called software-defined datacenter which includes three elements of computing: compute, network, and storage. Read more...

After server virtualization took off, virtualization became a buzzword which made it easy to get attention from market, and for startup companies, to get funding. Therefore you’ve seen many technologies claiming it’s * virtualization mostly for marketing purpose. Network virtualization is such a case. The even newer term for it is called software defined network, or simply SDN.

SNMP trap provides a very useful way to monitor vSphere. You can use either GUI or vSphere API to configure up to 4 trap receivers. With that I can use alarm to monitor events or state changes.

If you use vSphere API to add SNMP receivers, you will need the OptionManager managed object. The related options you want to set are: snmp.receiver.1.name, snmp.receiver.1.port, snmp.receiver.1.community, snmp.receiver.1.enabled. There are 3 more sets with similar names but different numbers (2, 3, 4). Read more...

To my curiosity, I attended the session “Building UI Add-ins for System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager” by Jonobie Ford, who is the program manager of the add-in SDK. As you may know, I wrote several docs on vSphere Client plug-in and helped many partners to develop their plug-ins during my days at VMware. Read more...

After playing with the vCenter appliance simulator feature documented by William, I got into a show stopper that vCenter service (VPXD) could not be started. I don’t think it’s related to the simulator feature at all. My guess is that it’s caused by a sudden power off of the virtual machine but didn’t try to reproduce the problem that way – I care more to fix it than anything else. Read more...

I flew to Vegas this week for Microsoft Management Summit 2013, which happens to be in the same hotel (Mandalay Bay) as VMware Partner Exchange one and half months ago. The organizations and activities of both conferences are pretty similar – keynotes, breakout sessions, hands on labs (HOL). It’s pretty exciting to learn new technologies and meet new people.

In previous posts, I’ve covered an Java API called JGIT for working with GIT. Besides the low level APIs, JGIT also supports high level command line like interfaces. If you know how to use the GIT command line, you can use the APIs. Note that it’s different from calling GIT commands or any other commands from Java code.

Here is a sample code I wrote to try out the APIs. Give it a try and you will like these high level APIs. Read more...

For most people who use the VMware Player, DHCP is good enough for the NAT network. That means the IP addresses of your virtual machines may change after each powering on.

What if you want to have static IP addresses? It’s pretty easy as long as it’s in the same subnet. For example, if the VMnet8 has IP address of 192.168.47.1, your virtual machines should be configured in the same network say 192.168.47.x, where X can be any value from 3 to 254 (2 reserved for gateway, 255 broadcast by default). Read more...

If you run VMware Player, you would have 3 networking options for virtual machines running there: Bridged, NAT, Host-Only. In the latest 5.0.1, I also found a new one: LAN Segment. This blog has a nice explanation on these three settings if you want to get more details.

In most of cases, I use NAT for networking because the virtual machine can have Internet access which allows me to install additional software as needed. By default, VMware Player uses DHCP to dynamically assign IP address while using NAT. So you cannot guarantee to get same IP address after each rebooting. Read more...

While reading Michael White’s newsletter (a weekly digest regarding VMware technology that I find very useful and read regularly) a while back, I came to know a small emulator tool for SDN called MiniNet (http://mininet.github.com/). I got a little time to read and play with it over the weekend and though it’s worthwhile to share my experience here.

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My company has created products like vSearch ("Super vCenter"), vijavaNG APIs, EAM APIs, ICE tool. We also help clients with virtualization and cloud computing on customized development, training. Should you, or someone you know, need these products and services, please feel free to contact me: steve __AT__ doublecloud.org.

Me: Steve Jin, VMware vExpert who authored the VMware VI and vSphere SDK by Prentice Hall, and created the de factor open source vSphere Java API while working at VMware engineering. Companies like Cisco, EMC, NetApp, HP, Dell, VMware, are among the users of the API and other tools I developed for their products, internal IT orchestration, and test automation.